I7: Programming error

[RedTulip]

A bug, I think…

On Inform 7, I’d change the story headline, example:

The story headline is "An Interactive [']Story[']".

After I press go, under the title of the game, it says…

[** Programming error: tried to print (string) on something not a string **]

Something like:

[i]The Story Title

[** Programming error: tried to print (string) on something not a string **]
by (RedTulip)
Release 1 / Serial number [6-charactered number] / Inform 7 build 6G60 (I6/v6.32 lib 6/12N) SD[/i]

[Skinny_Mike]

Yeah, please report this as a bug. It directly contradicts the docs:

@ch. 23.2. Bibliographic data

The text of these bibliographic descriptions cannot normally include text substitutions, since they are written into external descriptions of the story file as part of its “binding”. One exception is allowed, though: “[']” makes a literal apostrophe, and can be used if we need to override Inform’s normal conventions to do with converting apostrophes at the ends of words to double-quotes. For instance:

“Summer of [']69” by Buzz Aldrin

If you need quotes, you can just do this: The story headline is "An Interactive 'Story'".
If you need an apostrophe, I’m not sure if there’s a workaround.
Edited to add: the example (“Summer of [']69” by Buzz Aldrin) works, but the docs indicate that this substitution should work with all bibliographic descriptions which as you’ve found, it does not.

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

Looks like it’s already been reported:

Issue 553

Graham fixed the related bug for the story title, so I imagine this bug won’t be too hard to fix in the next version. Doesn’t make it less annoying in the meantime.